Chapter VII (2)

Mr. Spencer has much to say of "the imbecility of human intelligence when brought to bear on the ultimate question." What is the ultimate question? The ultimate question with which science and philosophy are concerned is the existence of the Supreme Being. It is of the utmost consequence for us to understand wherein consists the imbecility of human intelligence when brought to bear upon this question of the existence of God. How does our imbecility manifest itself? What is the point beyond which thought can not go? We become conscious of the existence of the being called man, because, from the phenomena which we know that he produces by the exercise of his will and power, and which we know must have had an author and producer, we deduce an existence beyond the phenomena, an actor in their production. What more, or what that is different, do we do or undertake to do, when, from the phenomena of nature which we know that man did not produce, we think of another existence beyond the phenomena? In both cases, we study the phenomena by our senses and powers of observation; in both cases we reason that there is an actor who produces the phenomena; yet the existence of the actor who produces the phenomena is inscrutable in the case of the Deity in the same sense and for the same reason that it is inscrutable in the case of man. How the human mind came to exist, by what process it was made to exist, by what means it was created, what was the genesis of the human intellect, is just as inscrutable, no more and no less so, as the mode in which the Deity came to exist. In both cases the existence of a being is what we think of; and when we think of either being we think of that which is beyond phenomena but which we deduce from phenomena. In neither case do we "accept a formless consciousness of the inscrutable"; for what we accept is the consciousness of a being, and it is not a consciousness of the mode in which he came to exist. The latter consciousness is the inscrutable problem. The existence is what we think of, and we think of it by a perfectly true process of thought, deducing it from the simple truth that the phenomena must have had an actor in their production. We do not undertake to think of the process by which man was created, or of the mode in which that other existence came to be without beginning and without end.

I have thus discriminated between what we do and what we do not think of, when we think of an existence beyond phenomena, but which we deduce from phenomena. This is a most necessary discrimination; for, in thinking of the existence, we do not try to think how it came to be an existence. We think only of the existence; and we deduce it from our observation and study of phenomena, which teach us that they must have had an actor, an author, a producer, and that they did not produce or create themselves.

It remains for me to advert to Mr. Spencer's theory of the origin of the religious consciousness, or the origin of the idea of supernatural beings, and hence of one highest supernatural being. This is his ghost-theory. He has recently told us that in his "Descriptive Sociology"--a work commenced in 1867, and which preceded his "Principles of Sociology" (written in 1874)--he caused to be gathered adequate materials for generalization, consisting of a great number of excerpts from the writings of travelers and historians who have given accounts of the religious beliefs of the uncivilized races. He numbers 697 of these extracts which refer to the ghost-theory, and only 87 which refer to fetichism. This great ratio of eight to one he considers overwhelming proof that the ghost-theory, as opposed to fetichism, is sustained by the beliefs of a vast majority of the uncivilized races. What if it is? What is the ghost-theory, and what is fetichism, as the chief source and origin of religion? Mr. Spencer, in his recent article, explains fetichism as most persons understand it, namely, the worship of inanimate objects, or belief in their supernatural powers. The ghost-theory, which his 697 extracts illustrate, is "the belief in a wandering double, which goes away during sleep, or fainting, and deserts the body for a longer period at death; a double which can enter and possess other persons, causing disease, epilepsy, insanity, etc., which gives rise to ideas of spirits, demons, etc., and which, originates propitiation and worship of ghosts."[100] Further on, he reiterates his ghost-theory as the origin of religious beliefs, and explains it thus:

Setting out with the statement that "unlike the ordinary consciousness, the religious consciousness is concerned with that which lies beyond the sphere of sense," I went on to show that the rise of this consciousness begins among primitive men with the belief in a double belonging to each individual, which, capable of wandering away from him during life, becomes his ghost or spirit after death; and that from this idea of a being eventually distinguished as supernatural, there develop, in course of time, the ideas of supernatural beings of all orders up to the highest. Mr. Harrison has alleged that the primitive religion is not belief in and propitiation of the ghost, but is worship of "physical objects treated frankly as physical objects" (p. 498). That he has disproved the one view and proved the other, no one will, I think, assert. Contrariwise, he has given occasion for me to cite weighty authorities against him.

Next it was contended that in the assemblage of supernatural beings thus originating in each tribe, some, derived from chiefs, were superior to others; and that, as the compounding and recompounding of tribes gave origin to societies having social grades and rulers of different orders, there resulted that conception of a hierarchy of ghosts or gods which polytheism shows us. Further it was argued that while, with the growth of civilization and knowledge, the minor supernatural agents became merged in the major supernatural agent, this single great supernatural agent, gradually losing the anthropomorphic attributes at first ascribed, has come in our days to retain but few of them; and, eventually losing these, will then merge into a consciousness of an Omnipresent Power to which no attributes can be ascribed. This proposition has not been contested.

Without entering into any consideration of what Mr. Harrison has disproved or proved, as between fetichism and the ghost-theory, I will now ask why the beliefs of the uncivilized races, or of the primitive men, should be regarded as important evidence of the origin of beliefs among civilized and cultivated men? Is modern philosophy, in accounting for or justifying the belief in a Supreme Being which is held to-day by most of the cultivated and educated part of mankind, to assign its origin to the primitive and uncivilized men? Is the whole idea of a supernatural being to be regarded as traditionally handed down from our barbarian ancestors? Is there no other source from which we can derive that idea? Are we none of us capable of finding for ourselves rational grounds of belief in a supernatural agent, deducing his existence from a study of nature? Or must we trace this belief back through the ages until we arrive at an origin which we shall of course despise? What has philosophy to do now with "the primitive religion"? Is there nothing that science and reason and disciplined methods of thought and sound deduction can teach us? Are we to throw away all the proofs which nature spreads before us, and for the investigation of which we have accumulated so many facilities, and turn to the beliefs of uncivilized men? Are the conceptions of supernatural beings, to which a barbarian attained, to be taken as the origin of the conception of a personal God to which an educated philosopher can now attain? And because of the inadequate and childish superstitions of the past, and of their growth into a belief of one supreme supernatural agent--whatever that idea of him may have been--is the consciousness which we have of a personal God to be hereafter merged into a consciousness of an Omnipresent Power to which no attributes can be ascribed?

It should seem that the mode in which philosophy, after it came to be cultivated by civilized thinkers and observers, freed itself first from fetichism and the ghost-theory and all the beliefs of polytheism, next from physical agents as the causes of all phenomena, and finally attained an independent conception of a First Cause as a supreme personal intelligence and power, is worthy of some consideration.

In the first chapter of this work, borrowing from the English scholar and critic, Mr. Grote, I have given a condensed account of some of the systems of Greek philosophy which began in the first half of the sixth century before Christ, and extended down to Plato, whose life was embraced in 427-347 of the ante-Christian era. About 150 B. C., the Greek philosophy, and especially the speculations of Plato, encountered at Alexandria the monotheism of the Hellenizing Jews.[101] This history of Greek philosophy, as developed by Mr. Grote, shows that the struggle against polytheistic agencies, as the causes of natural phenomena, began with efforts to find purely physical agencies; that this struggle, in spite of the surrounding beliefs in a multitude of supernatural beings of different orders, was long continued, and gave rise to a most remarkable variety of scientific explanations: that it passed through an extraordinary number of physical theories, until at length in Plato there was developed the idea of a distinct personal constructive actor, the Demiurgus, a being to whom, whether intended by Plato as a philosophical myth, or as an entity in which he had something of faith or conviction, he assigned the formation of his Kosmos. With characteristic acumen, the English commentator points out Plato's skill in eluding the possible charge of infidelity to the established religion of Athens, while he at the same time propounded the existence of a personal First Cause that was in a striking degree inconsistent with the popular faith. The whole course of this history of Greek speculation evinces that from an early period the Greek philosophers were utter skeptics in regard to the popular religion and the poetic traditions; that they not only did not derive anything from the primitive religion, from fetichism, from the ghost-beliefs of their barbarian ancestors--if their ancestors had such beliefs--or from their heroic ages, or from the multitudinous gods of the popular theology and the popular worship, or from the old poetical imagery, but that they strove to get away from all these sources, and to construct theories of the universe that would explain the ultimate cause or causes in a very different manner. The earliest Greek speculators got no further in their theories than the construction of systems of physical agencies, or agencies that stood to them in the quality of physical actors. Plato, on the other hand, resorted to the conception of a supreme personal actor.

Mr. Grote has further mentioned a very striking fact, which is, that before the Christian era, the Demiurgus of Plato was received by the Hellenizing Jews at Alexandria as a conception kindred to the God of Moses. His statement, in substance the same as that previously made by a Continental critic, Gfrörer, is so interesting and important that I quote his words: "But though the idea of a pre-kosmic Demiurgus found little favor among the Grecian schools of philosophy before the Christian era, it was greatly welcomed among the Hellenizing Jews at Alexandria, from Aristobulus (about B. C. 150) down to Philo. It formed the suitable point of conjunction between Hellenic and Judaic speculation. The marked distinction drawn by Plato between the Demiurgus, and the constructed or generated Kosmos, with its in-dwelling gods, provided a suitable place for the Supreme God of the Jews, degrading the pagan gods by comparison. The 'Timæus' was compared with the book of Genesis, from which it was even affirmed that Plato had copied. He received the denomination of the Atticising Moses--Moses writing in Attic Greek. It was thus that the Platonic 'Timæus' became the medium of transition from the polytheistic theology, which served as philosophy among the early ages of Greece, to the omnipotent monotheism to which philosophy became subordinated after the Christian era."[102]

Perhaps there is no more remarkable fact than this in the whole history of philosophical speculation. Possibly Mr. Spencer would say that it adds another proof to his ghost-theory. But the important fact is that Plato's Demiurgus partakes in no degree of the ghost idea, and, instead of being a modification of that idea, is an original and perfectly independent conception. The Demiurgus of Plato is not a chief spirit evolved in imagination out of a hierarchy of spirits. He is himself the originator and fashioner of the gods, of whom he makes use as ministers in the formation of the bodies of the primitive men, after he has himself formed the souls which are to inhabit them for a season.

It appears, by Mr. Grote's citations from Gfrörer, that the latter had previously noted what Aristobulus maintained one hundred and fifty years earlier than Philo, namely, that "not only the oldest Grecian poets, Homer, Hesiod, Orpheus, etc., but also the most celebrated thinkers, especially Plato, had acquired all their wisdom from a very old translation of the Pentateuch." Neither of these modern critics appears to have accepted the assertion of Aristobulus, and its intrinsic improbability is very great. Certainly the internal evidence of the "Timæus" negatives the assumption that Plato had seen the Pentateuch, for his Demiurgus is not the God of Moses, although it was very natural for the Alexandrian Jews to think they recognized a resemblance. Mr. Grote, moreover, seems to put this matter beyond doubt, for he says that the Platonic "Timæus" _became the medium of transition_ from the polytheism of early Greece to the monotheism of the Christian era. This implies very clearly that Mr. Grote did not consider the Demiurgus of Plato to be either derived from the polytheism of the early Grecian ages, on the one hand, or from the Mosaic Jehovah, on the other hand, but that he considered it a conception which stood between them. The point of resemblance is in the idea of a divine and supreme personal actor in the production of phenomena.

It does not seem, therefore, that a philosopher at the present day is confined to the source of the primitive religion, be that source what it may. The primitive religion, whether its origin was fetichism or a belief in ghosts, has imposed no shackles upon our minds. The beliefs of the primitive men may have originated as Mr. Spencer supposes, but the question for us--revelation being laid aside--is just what it was for Plato, the difference being that our means of investigation are superior to his. The grounds of our belief in a personal God are not the same as those on which the uncivilized races formed first the idea of a wandering double emanating from the human body, then conceived of spirits or ghosts, next of different orders of spirits or ghosts, and finally of a chief and supreme spirit. Our materials for sound deduction are not the same as those of the primitive races of mankind, or of the uncivilized tribes of the present day. I have before remarked that the intellectual effort of a savage in striving for the idea of a deity is the same kind of effort as that of the civilized and educated man; but that the difference between them is in the growth and activity of the reasoning power, and in the materials on which it is exercised. While our barbarian predecessors lived in an age of ignorance, we live in an age of knowledge. We are surrounded by extraordinary discoveries, and are possessed of the means of still further research. They had almost no means for investigating physical phenomena. We are, or ought to be, disciplined reasoners. They, on the contrary, while able to reason correctly on a very few subjects, could not reason correctly on all subjects. We are, or ought to be, capable of subjecting the materials which the phenomena of nature spread before us, to sound processes of thought and to logical deductions. We are, or ought to be, capable of discriminating between that which is really inscrutable and that which is not so. We are, or ought to be, able to know when we are within the bounds of possible thought, and when we transcend them. We are, or ought to be, able to see that the existence of phenomena necessarily implies a causing power; that when the phenomena are such as we know that man produces, the idea of an intelligent personal actor is both a legitimate deduction and a perfectly appreciable subject of thought. Are we not entitled to apply the same reasoning to the phenomena of nature which we know that man did not produce? And when we so reason, do we borrow anything whatever from the primitive idea of ghosts or spirits, whether they are supposed to have first emanated from human bodies, or to reside in inanimate objects?

There are two distinct values to be assigned to the researches of science. One of them consists in the practical improvement of the material condition of society; the lessening of physical evil, the increase of physical good; the advancement of our power over matter. In an age intensely devoted to this materialistic improvement, there will be a great accumulation of physical knowledge. At the same time there are accumulating in the same ratio new materials for philosophical speculation concerning the causes of the phenomena that are investigated. The specialists who carry on the investigations may not always be the best reasoners in the application of the new materials to the purpose of philosophical inquiry into the producing causes of the phenomena. But the other distinct value of their investigations consists in the accumulation of materials from which the philosopher can deduce the existence of an actor in the production of the phenomena. When, from these materials, constantly accumulating and constantly to be used in a uniform process of reasoning to which the human mind is both able and obliged to resort, the philosopher deduces the conception of a supreme, personal, intelligent being, he assigns to that being just those attributes which the phenomena of nature compel him to believe in, because if the attributes did not exist the phenomena of nature could not have become what they are. There can be no reason to suppose that as the materials increase, as the researches of science, for whatever purpose carried on, lead to greater and still greater accumulations of knowledge, the law of thought by which we deduce the idea of an actor in the production of phenomena will change, or that the logical necessity for conceiving, or the intellectual capacity to conceive of, the attributes of that actor will either diminish or fade away. An Omnipotent Power without attributes, or one to which no attributes can be assigned, is not likely to be the end of all philosophical speculation about the ultimate cause. Power without attributes, power without a determining will, power without guidance, or purposes, or objects, is not a conception to which a well-trained intellect is now likely to attain; and the greater the accumulation of physical knowledge becomes, the greater will be the necessity to such an intellect for recognizing attributes, and for assigning them to the power which is manifested by the phenomena.

According to Mr. Spencer, the process by which mankind are ultimately to lose the consciousness of a personal Deity is the following: Anthropomorphic attributes were at first ascribed to the single great supernatural agent of whom the primitive men conceived. But in our days, the idea of such a supreme supernatural agent has come to retain but a few of these attributes. These few will eventually be lost, and there will be nothing left but a consciousness of an Omnipotent Power to which no attributes can be ascribed. The probability of this result depends upon the necessity for ascribing what are called anthropomorphic attributes to the Supreme Being; or, in other words, it depends upon the inquiry whether, in order to ascribe to the Supreme Being any attributes at all, we are necessarily confined to those which are anthropomorphic.

"Anthropomorphism," a term compounded from the Greek ἄνθρωπος, man, and μορφή, form, has come to signify the representation of the Deity under a human form, or with human attributes and affections. It is therefore important to know what we in fact do, when reasoning on the phenomena of nature, we reach the conclusion that they must have had an author or producer, and then ascribe to him certain attributes. The fact that the ancient religious beliefs ascribed to the Supreme Being grossly anthropomorphic attributes, is unimportant. So is the fact that the anthropomorphic attributes have been slowly diminishing in the conceptions of the reasoning and cultivated part of mankind. The really important question is whether there can be no conception of a Supreme Being without ascribing to him attributes which liken him to man; or whether, when the anthropomorphic attributes are lost, the idea of a personal God will be lost.

The essential character of any anthropomorphic or human attribute--power for example, or wisdom, or goodness--is that it is limited, imperfect, and liable to error. But when we conceive of these qualities as existing in absolute perfection and boundless capacity, while we retain the idea that they are personal qualities, we in fact divest them of their anthropomorphic or human character. It is a contradiction in terms to say that an imperfect human capacity is the same attribute as a divine and unlimited capacity. The difficulty with the ancient religious beliefs, the whole error of anthropomorphism, was that the conceptions stopped short of the idea of unlimited power, wisdom, and benevolence. The attributes ascribed to the Deity likened him to man in form, character, powers, dispositions, passions. He was an exaggerated human being, with vastly more power, more skill, more wisdom, but still with the same kind of power, skill, and wisdom, actuated by like motives and governed by like passions. Now the truth is, that the difference between a limited and imperfect attribute of character and one that is boundless--power, for example--is more than a difference of degree. It is a difference in kind; for while in both cases we conceive of a personal capacity to act and a will to guide the act, in the one case we are thinking of that which is inferior, limited, and feeble, and in the other case we are thinking of that which knows no limitations and is absolutely inexhaustible. It is not true, therefore, that there can be no conception of a Supreme Being without ascribing to him human attributes. When we reason from phenomena to the conclusion that they must have had an author--when we reach the conviction that phenomena must have had a cause, that there must have been an actor, a process, and a product--we have to deal with two classes of phenomena. One is the class in which we know, from the observations of our senses and our experience, that the author and actor was man. It becomes verified to us with irresistible certainty that the phenomena of human society were produced by an actor, and that that actor was man; a personal agent with a limited and imperfect power. When we turn to the phenomena of nature which we know that man did not produce, we are led by the same irresistible logical sequence of thought to the conviction that these phenomena must have been caused to exist, for human reason revolts at the idea that the phenomena which exist were not caused to exist. We come immediately to perceive that the phenomena of nature are of such a character that the power which has produced them must not only have been superhuman, but it must have been absolutely boundless. At the moment we depart from the investigation of phenomena which belong in the department of human efforts, and come to the phenomena which belong in the department of nature alone, while the necessity for a personal actor continues, the character and capacities of the actor become entirely changed. We see that the phenomena of nature required for their production power without limitation, skill incapable of error, benevolence that was inexhaustible. We thus pass entirely away from anthropomorphic attributes, to the conception of attributes that are not human. We may go on to divest the idea of a Supreme Being of all the attributes that can appropriately be classed as anthropomorphic, and there will still remain the conception of a Supreme Being to whom we not only may but must ascribe attributes that are forced upon our convictions, not because some of them belong in an inferior degree to man, but because all of them are of such a character that if they did not exist in boundless perfection the phenomena of nature could not have existed.

Among the origins which have been assigned to religious beliefs, there is one remarkable hypothesis which may be contrasted with the ghost-theory, and which, so far as the beliefs of cultivated men at the present day are concerned, is about as important as the origin of the belief in ghosts, or as fetichism. It seems that some of the Greek philosophers and historians, entirely regardless of the ghost-theory as the origin of beliefs in supernatural beings, considered that they were fictions invented by the first lawgivers, and promulgated by them for useful purposes. Belief in the gods was thus imposed by the authority of those who organized society and dictated what men were to believe in order to exercise a useful restraint. Plato himself regarded this as the origin of what the communities around him believed respecting the attributes and acts of the gods; the matters believed being fictions prescribed by the lawgivers. In his "Republic," in which he sketches the entire political, social, ethical, and religious constitution of an ideal city, assuming it to be planned and put in operation by an absolute and unlimited authority, he laid it down as essential for the lawgiver to determine what the fictions were to be in which his own community were to be required to believe. Some fictions there must be; for in the community there would be originally nothing but a vague emotional tendency to belief in supernatural beings, and this tendency must be availed of by some positive mythical inventions which it was for the lawgiver to produce and the citizens to accept. Such fictions were the accredited stories about the gods and heroes, which formed the religious beliefs among Plato's contemporaries, and were everywhere embodied in the works of poets, painters, and sculptors, and in the religious ceremonies. But the ancient fictions were, in Plato's opinion, bad, inasmuch as they gave wrong ethical ideas of the characters of the gods. They did not rest upon traditionary evidence, or divine inspiration, being merely pious frauds, constructed by authority and for an orthodox purpose. But they did not fulfill the purpose as well as they should have done. Accordingly, Plato directs in his "Republic" the coinage of a new body of legends, for which he claims no character of veracity, but which will be more in harmony with what he conceives to be the true characters of the gods, and will produce a more salutary ethical effect upon those who are to be the efficient rulers of the commonwealth after it is founded. As the founder of his ideal city, he claims and exercises an exclusive monopoly of coining and circulating such fictions, and they are to be absolutely accepted by those who are to constitute its rulers, and who are to promulgate and teach them to the community, as the physician administers wholesome remedies. To prevent the circulation of dissenting narratives, he establishes a peremptory censorship. There is thus no question of absolute truth or absolute falsehood. That is true which is stamped at the mint of the lawgiver, and that is false which he interdicts.[103]

Nowhere has orthodoxy been rested more distinctly upon the basis of absolute human authority--authority acting upon the highest motives of the public good, for the most salutary purposes, but without claiming anything in the nature of divine inspiration, or even pretending to any other truth than conformity to preconceived ideas of the characters of the gods. As evidence of what Plato regarded as the origin of the religious beliefs which were held by his contemporaries, his "Republic" is an important testimony; for he assigns almost nothing to mankind in general, but an emotional tendency to believe in invisible quasi-human agents, of whom they had no definite conceptions, and at the same time they were entirely ignorant of recorded history, past and present. They needed distinct legendary fictions and invented narratives; these were furnished to them by those who could coin them, and were accepted upon the authority of those who promulgated them. Those who first embodied the fictions as narratives were the oldest poets; in progress of time the authority which dictated belief in them came to be the state. Plato rejected the fictions of the state, and in his "Republic" proposed to substitute fictions of his own. The testimony of Plato, therefore, in respect to the origin of religious beliefs in the early ages of Greece is decidedly against the ghost-theory, whatever support may be found for that theory in the beliefs of the uncivilized races of our own day, or in the beliefs of other nations of antiquity. But neither the ghost-theory, as the origin of beliefs in supernatural beings, nor the origin of such beliefs in the will of the lawgiver, which Plato clearly held in his "Republic" to be the foundation of orthodoxy, is any test or measure of what philosophy may attain to as a rational conception at the present day.[104]

I propose, therefore, to imagine a man of mature years, without any religious prepossessions whatever, a perfectly independent thinker, furnished with the knowledge that is now within the easy reach of human acquisition, capable of correct reasoning, and with no bias to any kind of belief. It is only necessary to personify in one individual the intellectual capacity of the cultivated and educated part of mankind, but without the religious ideas instilled into them by education, in order to have a valuable witness to the mental processes and results which can be followed and attained by a right employment of our faculties. And, the better to exhibit the processes and results, I propose to let this imaginary person discuss in the form of dialogue, in which another imaginary interlocutor shall be a modern disciple of the evolution school, whatever topics would be likely to come into debate between such persons.

FOOTNOTES:

[93] "Essays," vol. iii, pp. 293-296.

[94] For the answer to the objection that we thus ascribe anthropomorphic attributes to the Supreme Being, see _infra._

[95] Webster's Dictionary, "Phenomenon."

[96] Our other American lexicographer, Worcester, who was pretty strict in regard to the words which he admitted into the English language, gives the word "noumenon," but he was careful to designate its arbitrary use. His definition is this:

"Noumenon, _n._ [Gr. νοῦς, the mind.] In the philosophy of Kant, an object in itself, not relatively to us; opposed to _phenomenon_. _Fleming_."

[97] Prof. Huxley, who claims a sort of patent right or priority of invention in the term and doctrine "agnosticism."

[98] "There are some things I know and some things I believe," said the Syrian; "I know that I have a soul, and I believe that it is immortal." ...

"I wish I could assure myself of the personality of the Creator," said Lothair; "I cling to that, but they say it is unphilosophical!" "In what sense," asked the Syrian, "is it more unphilosophical to believe in a personal God, omnipotent and omniscient, than in natural forces, unconscious and irresistible? Is it unphilosophical to combine power with intelligence?"--_Disraeli's "Lothair."_

[99] The practice of judging of the future by the past is sometimes treated as if it were a mere habit of the uncultivated and undisciplined part of mankind--a kind of mental weakness. Undoubtedly, our past experience is not always an infallible guide to what is to be our experience in the future. We often have to correct our past experience, by carefully separating the accidental from the essential; by more comprehensive analysis of the facts which constitute our former experience. But when we have full, comprehensive, and accurate views of that which has happened to us heretofore, our beliefs in what is to happen to us hereafter are not only attained by a safe process of reasoning, but that process is imposed upon us by a law of our mental constitution.

[100] "Nineteenth Century" for November, 1884, p. 827.

[101] Grote's "Plato," iii, pp. 284, 285.

[102] Grote's "Plato," iii, p. 285, and notes.

[103] Grote's "Plato," iii, p. 181 _et seq._

[104] The contradictions between Plato's ideas of the origin of beliefs in the gods, as given in his various writings, are of course unimportant in reference to the present discussion. In the "Timæus," as Mr. Grote has pointed out, Plato "accepts the received genealogy of the gods, upon the authority of the sons and early descendants of the gods. These eons must have known their own fathers; we ought, therefore, to 'follow the law and believe them,' though they spoke without either probable or demonstrative proof.... That which Plato here enjoins to be believed is the genealogy of Hesiod and other poets, though he does not expressly name the poets." (Grote, iii, p. 189, note.) In other words, the sons of the gods are authoritative witnesses to their genealogy, whose _ipsi diximus_ must be believed. On the other hand, in his "Republic" and "Leges," Plato rejects the authority of those witnesses, and boldly proclaims that their legends are fictions, which must be displaced by better fictions, more consonant to a true ethical conception of the characters of the gods. It is the province of the lawgiver to supply these better legends, but they are all the while fictions, although the multitude do not know that they are so. Mr. Grote accounts for these and other discrepancies in the writings of Plato by explaining that his different dialogues are not interdependent productions, but separate disquisitions. (See his admirable and critical examination of the Platonic canon, in Chapters IV, V, VI, of his first volume.)